Nature isn't really uniform. Sure, in most places it appears stable, but not everywhere. Laws of physics completely break down in a black-hole. So, the universe only appears stable from your limited vantage point. In actuality, it isn't really.
Do laws of physics always break down in a Black Hole? So even when the laws are breaking down they uniformly break down correct? If there really is no uniformity in nature then you cannot use induction since induction assumes trials under identical conditions will yield identical results. If you can’t use induction then you can’t use science, and I am sure you are not willing to admit that science is impossible. So back to my original question, how does the Hindu concept of God give us assurance that future trials under identical conditions will resemble past trials?
Not only this, but you do not even live your life consistently with your above statement, if you woke up tomorrow morning and your car was missing you wouldn’t say, “Welp, I guess my car just popped out of existence while I was asleep since there really is no uniformity in nature, after all the laws of physics do break down in a black hole!” No, you would assume that someone stole your car because you assume that future events will resemble past events under similar or identical conditions (i.e. cars sitting in garages don’t pop out of existence overnight). So please stop dancing around and answer my question, thank you.
Morality is subjective, there are no 'laws of morality' per se. Commandments? sure, but not laws. If you've ever taken an ethics course you'd be familiar with the whole "Is it immoral to steal to feed your family?" quandary. Morality isn't a black & white matter. However, the Hindu's do provide a Code of Conduct.
According to whom? You’re going to have to explain where you derive your moral authority from; merely stating that morality is subjective doesn’t make it so.
twenty ethical guidelines called yamas and niyamas, “restraints and observances.” These “do’s” and “don’ts” are found in the 6,000 to 8,000-year-old Vedas, mankind’s oldest body of scripture, and in other holy texts expounding the path of yoga.
Ok, and where did the Vadas come from? How was it revealed to mankind and which god revealed it to mankind?
So on and so forth, you can read the rest in the link.
What happens if someone doesn’t follow these rules? What happens if they do follow these rules? How do you know that these results actually do happen? Could the God who came up with these rules just being lying or does it have to follow these rules too?
Logic is using the information at hand to make what seem like reasonable conclusions at the time. It used to be logical to believe the Earth was flat and the sun was 17 miles away (what people believed when they wrote the bible).
It says in the Bible that the Sun is 17 miles away? You must be using a different Bible than me. That’s not even close to what we are talking about, I am talking about the dedcuctive laws of logic, namely that something cannot be “A” and “not A” at the same time and in the same relationship, something is either true or false, and that something is what is and is not what it is not. Where do those laws come from? How does the Hindu concept of God help explain this?
People's logic evolves based on the amount of new information we gain.
Not true, the laws of logic I expressed above have always been in existence. It’s your job to make sense of where they came from and how they fit into your view of reality.
1. The law of identity…[removed for space]
Those aren't inherently Christian ideas, they weren't even made by a Christian. They're just a few parameters for determining the validity of an argument. I don't see any reason why you as Christian would feel comfortable claiming these, & not any other religion; in our case, Hinduism.
Well then it should be easy to explain where they came from using naturalism or Hinduism. How do you have immaterial, universal, and immutable laws that discern truth in a purely natural universe or in a universe where distinction is actually illusion? The Christian has no problem at all explaining why contradictory ideas cannot both be true. Additionally, are you really going to say that Aristotle “made” those laws? You really believe that contradictions were everywhere prior to Aristotle “making” the law stating they can’t exist? Give me a break, that’s like saying Newton invented gravity. Aristotle merely articulated descriptive laws that did precisely that, described how we validly discern truth.
How do you know the Christian God's attributes? What do you have to go on other than writings in a book? Have you seen your God? Does he sit on clouds and have a big fuzzy beard? Is God a white guy? Black guy? A woman maybe? Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't know of any Christians anywhere that claim they know what God looks like.
So you’re going to dodge my question about the Hindu god? Nice. We know about God through His revealed word and the things that He has made. Do Hindus have direct revelation from their god(s)?
Here's what I'm interested for you to understand; You say God accounts for the 'preconditions of intelligibility'. Your reasoning for how he does this is because he's omnipotent and he can do whatever he wants, or that the "Bible says so". You have no way of proving & demonstrating HOW God accounts for these things outside of claiming he's omnipotent, or that it was written on a piece of paper, or that “no one else can”.
Sure I know how He accounts for all of the preconditions, He has revealed that information to us through scripture and the things He made. I don’t need any other revelation besides that, if He accounts for all of the preconditions (which He does) the debate is over because He then has to exist, and if He exists then He is the only God that exists. You haven’t even come close to postulating a view of reality that can account for even one of the preconditions of intelligibility much less all of them, so I am not sure what your objection really is.
Just because you don't believe any other alternative to be possible, doesn't make yours true; that's not how proof works.
What I believe has nothing to do with it, it’s what can be demonstrated. Take your argument concerning Hinduism; you couldn’t get Hinduism to account for any of the preconditions because it lacks a personal god that has revealed itself to us. So it is proof through negation, all other postulated ideas have failed and any appeals to unknown ideas are simply fallacious arguments from ignorance. That is how proof works actually.
I want you to consider for a second, that absolutely no one knows how the universe was created. Not Scientists, not Buddhists, not Christians, absolutely nobody. I keep trying to tell you that your syllogism isn't valid because it isn’t actually demonstrable, you just don't want to hear it. The existence of God is a matter of faith.
That’s a ridiculous hypothetical though because we do know who and how the universe was created. A God exactly matching the attributes of Yahweh has to have created us or else all knowledge would be impossible, only Yahweh has revealed Himself to us possessing those exact characteristics so He has to exist. You are starting off with the premise that god cannot be proven to exist and then using that to argue against any syllogism that actually does prove He exists which is completely circular. There is nothing that logically prevents us from proving god exists, so I am not sure why you even start off with that premise, and I am not sure why you tried to use the dictionary to prove this point, if Noah Webster had defined Christianity as the true religion would that logically prove Christianity were true? Uh, no.
Basically whichever fits your argument better. Is Noah’s Ark real or is it metaphorical?
Not just my decision at all, Hebrew as a language makes it very easy to determine what books are using historical narrative and which ones are being poetic, Noah’s Ark is in Genesis which is written as historical narrative so unless it’s using a simile (like or as) it’s going to be a historic account.
You didn’t read the paper I assume
I did! Nowhere in the entire paper does it say they even attempted to date a rock of empirically observed age, the only justification he gives in the paper are different isotopic methods yielding similar dates, that’s not going to work because the methods don’t actually always agree and they could all just be wrong by the same degree. Why is my request apparently such a difficult one? It should be really simple for someone to collect rocks of known age because we saw them being created and then use the methods on those rocks. If the methods are as sound as you seem to believe then they should give us accurate dates right?
Drop the act. You know what you were doing. No big deal in admitting you don’t measure up to Jesus (whether real or mythical). Christianity is afterall a religion founded on guilt. You know, the whole “this I doth for thee, what doest thou for me” inscribed under a picture of Jesus on the Cross, thing.
I know I don’t measure up to Jesus, that’s the point, that’s why we all need him because none of us measure up to him. That being said, I am still not sure why you think it’d hurt his feelings, all that does is perpetuate the stereotype of the overweight and ultra-sensitive atheist who dishes it out but then cries when someone takes the slightest jab at him. I don’t think that’s a stereotype you want to perpetuate. Psychology is not a real science, I think Jesus would agree with me on that :-P
So you still do contest the Creation of the Earth to be 6,000 years old then. You would then have the existence of Dinosaurs being concurrent with the Creation of Adam.
6,000 to 6,500, somewhere in that range. Yup, created on the same day of creation.
Scientists have collectively contested that the earliest evidence of Dinosaurs dates back about 230 million years, and ends about 65 million years ago. Meaning they walked the Earth for about 165 million years.
According to the secular timescale sure, of course that’s impossible because soft tissue cannot last that long and so therefore the dinosaur fossils we find it in cannot be that old.
By your contention, they couldn’t have walked the Earth for more than a couple hundred years, correct?
Incorrect, Dinosaurs would have been around in great numbers for the 1,500 years before the flood and even possibly in smaller numbers for a couple thousand years after the flood.
There is plenty of literature from civilizations that date back further than 5,000 years, none of them anywhere mention anything about Dinosaurs, including your Bible.
Also incorrect, of course the word “dinosaur” doesn’t appear in any literature, I’d be concerned if it did considering Richard Owen coined the term in the 19th century. However, the term “dragon” is used in nearly every major culture (with eerie similarity in description mind you). Several mysterious creatures are described in the book of Job and could very easily be dinosaurs or other pre-historic animals, Marco Polo described seeing dragons in China (the Chinese word for dinosaur stems from their word for dragon); even the story of Beowulf describes the killing of a large bipedal lizard which they call a dragon. Many inscriptions and drawings of animals even appear to resemble dinosaurs, long before the first fossil was ever discovered. The phenomena of ancient cultures all describing these dragons as large reptiles is so perplexing that even Carl Sagan tried to figure out where it stemmed from and was left baffled (he did try to postulate some ridiculous theory about dragons just being some residual memory from our reptile days which is just absurd since memories are not passed down genetically). Within the context of the Biblical timeline it makes perfect sense though. The whole idea of dragons being merely mythological stems from the 19th century because at that period in time people believed that species were fixed, they didn’t know they ever went extinct, so when they heard stories about creatures that could no longer be found living today they just assumed they were mythological.
Sure it was, the term dinosaur and T-Rex were not coined yet so of course they used other terms to describe the creatures. In central Africa the locals have described a creature they have seen off and on for the last 100 years in their area (known as Mokele-mbembe), the description of the creature sounds like a small Apatosaurus (even though many of the locals have not been exposed to dinosaurs by the media). Large unexplainable tracks were found in the area by an expedition launched by the Smithsonian Institute in 1919 and 1920. The creature was even spotted by a biologist in the area in 1983 and described below…
“At approximately 2:30pm, … we were then able to observe a strange animal, with a wide back, a long neck, and a small head. … The animal was located at about 300 metres from the edge of the lake, and we were able to advance about 60 meters in the shallow water, placing us at a distance of about 240 meters from the animal, which had become aware of our presence and was looking around as if to determine the source of the noise. Dinkoumbou [a local villager] continued to shout with fear. The frontal part of the animal was brown, while the back part of the neck appeared black and shone in the sunlight. The animal partly submerged, and remained visible for 20 minutes with only the neck and head above the water. It then submerged completely, … no further sighting of the animal took place. It can be said with certainty that the animal we saw was Mokele-mbembe, that it was quite alive, and, furthermore, that it is known to many inhabitants of the Likouala region. Its total length from head to back visible above the waterline was estimated at 5 meters.”- Marcellin Agnagna
The aboriginals had terms for creatures that very closely resembled dinosaurs, one being the “Bunyip” which was drawn by an aboriginal and published in an 1845 edition of the “Geelong Advertiser” (seen below) and was described to have scales of different colors, walk on two legs, having a “duck” bill and lay pale blue eggs twice the size of emu eggs. The drawing was made 13 years before duck-billed dinosaur fossils were found in Australia, when shown the fossils several different groups of aboriginals identified them as “Bunyip” bones.
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